Both online (e.g. web-based) and offline tools, systems, or mechanisms used to perform reporting and/or analysis (hereinafter referred to as reporting systems) such as Excel, Web Intelligence (hereinafter referred to as WebI), Crystal Reports, and/or Lotus may support several operations. These operations may comprise query statements, functions, formulas, and formula functions. The operations may be used to analyze or manipulate documents such as reports, report documents and/or files (hereinafter referred to as report files) provided and/or generated by the reporting systems. Hence, an aspect of using reporting systems may be specifying and/or creating operations in order to analyze and/or manipulate at least one report file e.g. by calculating quantitative and/or qualitative information.
However, when a user invokes or requests help data, functions or functionality during the process of performing operations, current reporting systems merely retrieve a static document (e.g. a HTML page or a XHTML page) comprising a predefined generic example which may not be useful, or may even be meaningless in the context of the operations being performed by a user, i.e. a user's context such as a context of a report file for which help has been requested. In other words, the current ‘help’ functionality for reporting systems such as WebI, Crystal Reports or Excel does not include effective contextual help.
Hence, there may be a need to provide user-friendly, dynamically generated help data for user operations. It may also be desirable for the help data to be context aware and/or context sensitive, i.e. help data which may be contextual or context driven regarding to a user context (where a user context may be one or more report files the user wants to analyze and/or manipulate using operations). In contrast to static predefined help data, dynamic context-aware help data may provide a user with actual expressions (e.g. one or more exemplary context aware or context sensitive operations) which can be used in a report file. Dynamic, context-aware help data may additionally provide a useful result (when computed from the report file) when the context sensitive exemplary operations comprised in the help data are applied to the report file.